A Tangle of New Veins

They hung suspended in the white-walled room; two mountainous landscapes lit with an unearthly glow. A bluish light filtered through two large criss-cross windows at the far end, highlighting their jagged peaks and swooping troughs with stark shadows.

The sculptures, made out of a kind of translucent white elastic, filled the room with a questioning, adventurous presence. They were a canvas ready to be painted by our anticipating minds.

She walked into the room calm and quiet, with a steady focus, making her way towards their centre. Climbing into a navy blue boiler suit spattered with coloured remnants of past experiments, she began.

As her concentration stilled, ours followed.

She picked up a strand of bright orange thread and passed it through the eye of a large silvery needle. Looking closely, it became clear that she was surrounded by lots of small orange spools coiled into tiny polka dots on the floor and attached to various parts of her suit; primed to become part of the emergent dance.

She began, stitch by stitch, movement by careful movement, to sew herself to the landscape that surrounded her. There was not a sound in the room as we watched, transfixed.

At first, the lengths of thread were long, evoking images of slender blood vessels, connecting her to a life force that was beginning to pulse through the enlivened landscape. The more connections were made, the more the elastic mountains began to respond, moulding around her with each tug.

Something else was happening too. The network of veins became denser and more tangled as time slipped on. The silent, attentive atmosphere began to darken, responding to the artist’s deepening exchange with this evolving, emergent place. Before simply associations, these threads ever so slowly began to restrict her movement.

Could it be that what began as a source of connection, life and inspiration was becoming a sink of bondage and restriction; each burnished link self-created and self-limiting as she steadily continued, one stitch following the other?

An hour had slipped past us and the tangle in which she was now deeply embedded was becoming tighter and tighter, ever more restrictive, as the mountain walls strained towards her and she towards them.

Her left arm immobilized, her head horizontal and her body pulled towards the ground she continued, slower now, but with a fixed determination.

The impressions were visceral. They spoke to a place beyond mind: to somewhere far deeper.

Still she sewed, one hand just about able to tease the thread slowly through the tangle as her head bowed and her body was bent almost completely double.

Until finally, she could sew no more.

She was fixed, stuck and confined by the very bonds she had created, stitch by stitch, careful motion by careful considered motion.

I found myself wondering how she would find a release: how she would emerge from this web of her own making, from her inherent humanness. Would she slip her last free hand into her pocket, pulling out an unseen knife to cut herself free?

———–

At first it was a tiny movement beneath the strained canopy. She began to wriggle her feet out of the heavy shoes in which they were encased, slipping them bare onto the cold stone floor beneath. At the same time, she tugged and pulled her arms inwards so that they vanished through the sleeves of her boiler suit. Then, pushing her arms upwards with a force and energy temporarily lost, she struggled her way out of the boiler suit, rising through the neck of what was now little more than an entangled sheath.

And thus it was that she emerged, shoeless, suitless and separate once more, as the shell of her entangled boiler suit lay like a skeletal caterpillar’s pupa on the floor, in a folded heap.

Metamorphosis

I was left reflecting on the relationship that exists in life between connection and restriction, between the essential associations we create with the world around us, and the way in which they can come to invisibly restrict our internal postures, movements and ways of being. Is there a dynamic balance to be found? Undoing as we do; unknowing as we know? And what happens when we move beyond that balance point into the space she was now treading, when we become caught in a tangle of veins of our own making?

Perhaps this process of engagement with ourselves, the search for dynamic balance that carries us through an endless tale of metamorphoses, of cycles of birth and death, of ashes and phoenixes, of bonds and release, is truly to live! Each time, in becoming naked to yourself once more, you must simultaneously fall and leap into the unknown, allowing the space for new possibilities, sights and landscapes to emerge, again and again.

This was my dear friend Rebecca Glover‘s first live performance at her studio in London. A wonderfully talented artist, she’s been increasingly experimenting with ideas around the relationship between self and environment, but this was the first time she had taken the brave and beautiful plunge to become a piece of the very artwork herself.